Janina Pawelz is a researcher and joined the IFSH in 2017. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the GIGA Institute for Asian Studies. She received her doctorate (2013-2016) from the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. At the GIGA she was a member of the “Peace and Security” research program, the "Identities, Ideology, and Conflict" research team and also held the position of Deputy Equal Opportunities Officer. Janina Pawelz studied political science, Austronesian studies and ethnology at the University of Hamburg and the Universitas Udayana, Indonesia. She worked for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) as an international consultant. She was an election observer in Timor-Leste in 2012 and is a member of the ZIF Expert Pool for Election Observation (Center for International Peace Operations - ZIF).

Janina Pawelz conducts research on political, collective and urban violence, social peace and radicalization with a special focus on youth, youth violence and non-violent conflict transformation. At the IFSH, she works on radicalization in the Salafist and extreme right spectrum. Her main focus is on how these phenomena manifest in social media. Further research interests in the field of peace and security include the dynamics of violence, gangs and transformation processes of violent groups, forms of legitimacy and control of armed actors and their claim to power, and exercise of power from a comparative perspective. For her doctoral thesis on the transformation of violent groups, she spent six months conducting field research in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean where she interviewed members of violent groups. She is interested in empirical methods, field research, development cooperation and monitoring and evaluation (M&E).

Current projects: PANDORA, CRISEA and NEOVEX

Publications